Analysis

Murder in Arizona

It's Only The Third World!

By Rodolfo F. Acuña

We only remember history, like the tree that falls in the forest,
when we hear or read about it. Unfortunately, when we hear about
the fallen tree, it is often too late to save it. In a matter
of speaking, This is what is happening in southern Arizona where
armed vigilante ranchers are brutalizing Mexican migrant workers,
while the US Border Patrol is abetting the ranchers' terrorist
acts.

The public reaction to these events has been mixed. The number
shootings and murders of Mexican migrants has surprised some of
those who first learn about them. The tale of ranchers on horseback
hunting Mexicans has outraged others. While stories of Mexican
migrants dying of thirst in the Arizona desert has moved others
to tears. However, for the most part, the majority does not appear
to hear about the atrocities, and when they do they seem immune
to any feeling of outrage. What is happening in southern Arizona
is treated as an aberration rather than the truth, that the violence
is part of American culture, and its disregard for the "other."

The central figure in this drama of vigilante ranchers is the
wanna be ranger, Roger Barnett, who has boasted that he has made
thousands of arrests of Mexican migrants on "his ranch."
Ironically, most of "his" ranches are lands leased from
Arizona at bargain sale prices. Emboldened by official inaction,
Barnett and his followers, although they deny it, have sent out
a racist "flyer" inviting white supremacist groups to
come to their ranches to help them "hunt" Mexican "aliens."
This Call has attracted kooks such as Studio City, California,
resident Glenn Spencer of "American Patrol" and Barbara
Coe, also of California.

The actions of the ranchers has gone beyond the bravado stage.
A young Mexican migrant worker named Miguel Palafox was shot,
after which he struggled back to Mexico for treatment. Palafox
accused Arizona cowboys on horseback of shooting him, a fact that
the Border Patrol and others deny and for which they blame Mexican
bandits.

Seeking explanations for what they consider a recent outbreak
of violence, human rights activists wonder why the press and people
of conscience are not doing anything about the human rights violations.
Why isn't there anyone marching to save the trees? They posit
that the cause of the violence is the Border Patrol's increased
militarization of the border during the 1980s and 1990s. Successful
operations and sweeps in El Paso and San Diego have forced undocumented
workers to brave the hazardous desert of southern Arizona. Moreover,
pressure from right wing extremist groups, according to these
critics, has helped nurture racist nativism of Americans, and
politicians have used immigration as a wedge issue. This in turn
has encouraged federal authorities to adopt a military solution
of preventing "dangerous people"criminal aliens
from outer space from crossing the US-Mexico border. The
militarization, according to this logic, has made the Border Patrol
leaner and meaner, with the external threat posed by terrorists
and drug traffickers justifying their tactics.

While much of this is true, it is too pat, mechanically constructed
to fit the polemics of globalization. The truth is that the tree,
or here, the trees have fallen but we just have not heard them.
The brutality on the border separating Arizona and Sonora is nothing
new. Southern Arizona is just not part of our historical memory.

The reasons for this historical lapse are complex but at the
same time simple: As one New York reporter told Professor Guadalupe
Castillo of Pima College, "The border is a Third World country,
and people just don't give a damn." The situation on the
border is much like that in the movie "Chinatown." No
one cares what happens in Chinatown. Just like few people outside
the barrios care about violence in the hood. Further complicating
things is that we write Chicano history from the perspective of
two poles, one centered in Texas and the other in California.
For the most part, we forget the space between poles.

Furthermore, acts of violence are not to southern Arizona.
They are a phenomenon of the past two decades. They are historical.
History tells us that the United States acquired southern Arizona
in 1853 at gun point when US minister James Gadsden told Mexico,
sell us southern Arizona for $10 million or we'll take it. As
a consequence of the occupation, the colonizers racialized labor,
and the border became a point of conflict, with Euroamericans
attempting to extend its border south to include the neighboring
Mexican state of Sonora.

Acts of violence were comon. In 1859, a posse hunted down a
runaway Mexican servant for N.B. Appel, a Tubac merchant, and
administered him fifteen lashes in public. That same year, they
hunted and whipped seven Mexican peons from the Riverton Ranch.
They cut their hair so close that they shaved off half their scalps.

Tensions got so bad in the territory during the 1870s that
the Sonoran government refused to extradite alleged lawbreakers
to Arizona. Industrialization of Arizona during the last two decades
of the 19th century worsened relations between the two peoples.
Mexican formed mutualistas, mutual aid societies, to protect their
interests.

White miners excluded Mexican miners from many mining camps,
as the mine owners institutionalized a double wage system. In
the first part of the century, even the militant Western Federation
of Miners excluded Mexicans. Violence was rampant, and nativist
tried to exclude Mexican labor from Arizona mines by passing anti-immigrant
legislation. In 1917, they deported Mexican miners from Jerome
and Bisbee. In Bisbee, local authorities rounded up 1200 strikers,
and threw them in bull pens, and then loaded them onto railroad
cars and shipped and dumped them in the middle of the New Mexican
desert in the heat of summer. Most of these miners were Mexican.

As late as World War II, segregation existed in Arizona. It
was not until the war that Mexicans could become apprentices and
skilled workers in the Southern Pacific. They segregated Mexicans
housing. They also segregated in the mines by work categories.
Even so, the border remained porous. The mines and agriculture
needed Mexican labor. The Border Patrol was founded in 1924; its
purpose was to prevent the entry of unauthorized persons and materials
into U.S. territory. This mission, however, began to change with
the Cold War and official concerns shifted toward the protection
the national territory from the allegedly foreign threats of terrorism
and drugs. This shift did not occur recently as commonly believed.
It began in the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration when
federal authorities increasingly turned toward military solutions
a way to control the influx of "dangerous" peoples into
the United States.

Dwight Eisenhower set a template for dealing with those dangerous
people. His Attorney General Herbert Brownell deployed propaganda
as a strategy. His message was that America's frontier with Mexico
was out of control. We were being overrun by dangerous people.
Brownell allegedly hinted to newspaper publishers that the best
way to seal the border was to shoot down a couple of "wetbacks,"
supposedly to scare the others away. Through a campaign of fear
and gross violation of human rights in the guise of "Operation
Wetback" the US Border Patrol supposedly halted "illegal
immigration" across the entire 2,000-mile US-Mexico frontier.

The man in charge of Operation Wetback was Eisenhower's former
classmate at West Point, retired Gen. Joseph Swing. Ever since
Swing INS commissioners have run the Border Patrol as a semi military
group. The name "Operation Wetback" betrays military
jargon. Swing reorganized the command structure, got new equipment,
and fitted them out in smart, forest-green uniforms. He approved
the use of a new tactic, the Mobile Task Force, to clampdown on
so-called illegal entrants in the worst problem areas. Swing carefully
orchestrated press coverage of Operation Wetback as if he were
launching a military campaign. Selective secrecy about the number
of agents in the task force and their tactics made the Border
Patrol seem even bigger and more menacing than they really were.

(That is the message it wanted to send: it was big and bad).
Swing's campaign heightened anti-US feelings between Mexicans,
and it reinforced a dehumanizing, military mentality to the Border
Patrol.

Swing's Cold War tactics also set into motion the pretext for
future growth of the Border Patrol. Following the example of the
military that created the Soviet threat, the Immigration and Naturalization
Service perpetuated the myth of "dangerous" people poised
on the border. The build-up began in the late 1960s whenin
reaction to the era's social upheaval, particularly the violent
inner-city riots, politicians increasingly turned to law-and-order
rhetoric and thinly veiled racial scapegoating for votes. This
political hype spawned the drug war"the Trojan horse
for deeper federal involvement in policing"and millions
of dollars poured out from Washington to modernize, professionalize,
and militarize local law enforcement over the next decade.

During the 1970s, the INS manufactured statistics, giving the
sense that all of Mexico was poised at the border ready to invade
the US. The INS used words such as invasion, and substituted the
name illegal alien for wetback, a term that had become politically
incorrect, but more important racist. The new term was even more
insidious. The euphemisms "illegal" really meant criminals,
"aliens" meant creatures from outer space, emoting a
sense of inhuman, or at the very least "a dangerous people."

As a result, tensions mounted in Arizona. Not surprisingly,
the Hanigan case occurred in this manufacture hysteria. In August
1976 Patrick Hanigan, his brother, Thomas, and their father, George,
captured Manuel Garcia Loya, Eleazar Ruelas Zavala, and Bernabe
Herrera Mata, who crossed their ranch, fronting the Mexican border
west of Douglas, Ariz. They tortured them, using hot pokers, cigarettes,
knives and fired a shotgun filled with bird shot at them. The
ordeal lasted several hours before sending them naked and bleeding
back across the border.

The Mexicans, undocumented workers, had entered the country
in the hope of finding farm work. The Hanigans besides being ranchers
owned Dairy Queen outlets in Bisbee, Ariz. An all white jury acquitted
Patrick and Thomas Hanigan in a state court in 1977 of kidnaping,
assault and robbery. George Hanigan had died shortly before the
state trial. Upon hearing the verdict, Mexican Consul Raul Avelyera
said it "declared open season on illegal aliens."

This should have ended the matter. However, Chicano organizations,
led by a group of young activists and law students, pressured
the Carter Administration to bring about justice. Activists in
Douglas organized demonstrations and a week-long boycott of white-owned
businesses on the U.S. side of the border. A national coalition
of Mexican American groups petitioned the Justice Department for
a civil rights probe, accusing the Carter administration of being
insensitive to their civil liberties. Because of the pressure,
the Justice Department announced a new probe of the Hanigan incident.

Chicano leaders stressed there had been at least fifteen killings
and more than 150 incidents of alleged brutality against Mexican
Americans, mainly by law-enforcement officials, during the last
three years. In Arizona alone, Border Patrol agents had shot and
wounded three undocumented aliens during the eighteen months before
1977.

The Federal court charged the Hanigans with violating the Hobbs
Act, a law that governs interstate commerce. The judge declared
a mistrial in the first federal trial in 1980 when a jury failed
to reach a verdict. A retrial took place in February 1981, and
Patrick Hanigan, convicted of obstructing interstate commerce
by torturing and robbing three illegal aliens nearly five years
before, was sentenced to three years in prison. A jury acquitted
Thomas Hanigan. The courts upheld the conviction on appeal. (Incidentally,
shortly after the trial, Thomas Hanigan, was arrested for possession
with intent to distribute 574 pounds of marijuana.)

In 1981 an all-white jury in Arizona state court found a former
rancher, W.M. Burris Jr., 28, guilty of unlawful imprisonment
and aggravated assault of a Mexican farm worker. It did not find
him guilty of the more serious charge of unlawful imprisonment
and kidnaping. Burris had used a deadly weapon, which should have
carried a mandatory five-year prison sentence. The rancher, suspecting
20-year-old Manuel Hernandez Garcia, an undocumented worker from
the state of Vera Cruz, of stealing chained his employee around
the neck so he would not leave the ranch.

During the 1980s few heard the falling of the trees outside
southern Arizona. Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported
117 cases of human rights abuses by US officials against migrants
from 1988 to 1990, including fourteen deaths. During the 1980s,
Border Patrol agents shot dozens of people, killing eleven and
permanently disabling ten.

To take the focus away from state violence, and to break the
growing opposition to the militarization of the border, the Reagan
Justice Department in the mid-1980s, prosecuted the religious
sanctuary movement. This movement specialized, according to authorities,
in the smuggling Central Americans into the United States. The
sanctuary movement began in 1980 as thousands of Salvadorans during
the growing civil unrest in their country sought refuge in the
United States. The federal government charged eleven religious
and lay activists in the sanctuary movement. Uncover agents infiltrated
immigrant rights groups. One center was Tucson.

The investigation led to the indictment in January 16, 1985
of sanctuary movement volunteers on charges that included criminal
conspiracy to smuggle, harbor and transport illegal aliens. They
supposedly based the so-called "transporters and smugglers"
in Arizona, and the "Nogales connection" that housed
immigrants in Nogales, Mexico, and directed them across the border.
Eventually, some defendants pled to lesser charges. They acquitted
others. Significant was the expenditure of time and effort in
prosecuting these so-called "dangerous people."

Another expression of the Reagan years, was the creation of
elite Border Patrol squads known as Border Patrol Tactical Teams
(BORTACS), which began receiving special paramilitary training
in the mid-1980s. By 1989 Congress had authorized 5,000 federal
troops for border duty. They built fences and walls and Border
Patrol budget zoomed. Combat-ready troops were committed, but
removed after public outrage over the shooting of an unarmed Mexican
national. The military, however, continued to provide aid to immigration
authorities. Some 600 U.S. Marines and army troops, built and
upgraded helicopter pads and roads. They deployed strategies of
counterinsurgency used by the U.S. military in Southeast Asia
in the 1960s. Their objective was to establish and maintain social
control over targeted civilian groups.

During this period, Arizona not only had the ranchers and the
coyotes to contend with but the U.S. Border Patrol, which critics
characterized as a rogue agency. By all accounts, the most renegade
branch was based along the northern expanses of the Sonoran desert.
There numerous cases were reported of agents involved in smuggling
drugs while on duty and murder and assaults. For instance, Armando
C. Garcia, Tucson's former chief detention officer, was placed
on three years probation in late 1991 after admitting that he
stole money from immigrants in the Border Patrol lockup. The agency
drew scrutiny from the FBI, Justice Department internal affairs
investigators, federal prosecutors and local law enforcement.

Some agents profited from the war on drugs. Douglas Agent Ronald
Michael Backues ferried marijuana in his pale green service Bronco.
He spent the proceeds on among other things on steroids for himself
and breast implants for his wife. Former Agent Gary Patrick Callahan
trafficked cocaine stolen from smugglers. The courts convicted
Veteran Border Patrol Investigator Willie Garcia for lying in
court about an accused heroin smuggler  a longtime informant
with whom Garcia had once had an intimate relationship. They fired
Thomas A. Watson, a five-year Nogales veteran, for complicity
in the cover-up of a fellow agent's fatal shooting of a suspected
trafficker. The courts acquitted Agent Michael Andrew Elmer of
murdering an unarmed suspected drug scout. A civil suit brought
by relatives of the dead man, Dario Miranda,Valenzuela, showed
that Elmer shot him twice in the back as he ran away.

The fire this time came when Arizona ranchers began to detain
undocumented workers crossing "their" land. Mexican
officials protested the detentions by ranchers near the border
town of Douglas, Ariz. Ranchers with firearms rounded up groups
of migrants on their land and delivered them to federal law enforcement
officials. Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner
Doris Meissner has encouraged the ranchers by saying they "have
legitimate concerns about the trespassers on their property."
While she condemned what she called "vigilantes," Meissner
said there was no evidence to support reports by Mexican media
that ranchers had shot at migrants in recent weeks.

Secretary Madeleine Albright says U.S. authorities would strengthen
efforts to monitor and, if warranted, prosecute the ranchers.
Still, she says that the ranchers had the right to evict trespassers
from their land, saying that the problem lies too with Mexican
criminal organizations that make the smuggling of illegal immigrants
across the Mexico-U.S. border big business, conveniently shifting
the focus to the "dangerous people"the drug traffickers
and the coyotes.

As mentioned an anonymous leaflet invited winter vacationers
to park their recreational vehicles on border ranches to help
property owners guard against the migrants. Emboldened by the
inaction of local, state and federal officials, Roger Barnett
show boated for the press, calling this an "extremely sensitive
and dangerous situation," an "overwhelming invasion
of thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens and drug traffickers
from Mexico into Cochise County." He called for the "drastic
need for action in the interests of national security, citizen
safety and protection of wildlife resources and habitat."
Barnett and his brother, Don, have allegedly detained up to 170
migrants in a day. Understandably, this has brought a reaction
from Mexicans. In June a retired oil worker in northern Mexico
offered a $10,000 bounty for anyone who shot a US border patrol
agent.

Meanwhile, people are dying trying to cross the Sonoran Desert
to get a piece of what we daily advertise on their TV's. After
walking three days in the searing desert with her 18-month-old
daughter on her hip, Yolanda Gonzalez, 19, from Oaxaca gave the
last of her water to her baby and died during the first days of
June. Four Mexicans perished that week. From October to June of
this year, eighteen people have died of exposure and dehydration
in the Sonoran Desert. Expanded Border Patrol enforcement in California
and Texas has funneling thousands through the Arizona desert.

Border Patrol policy is however not without a fault for these
deaths. According to Guadalupe Castillo, a longtime Tucson activist,
the stepped-up enforcement is killing border crossers: "They
are being pushed into harsher terrain." Meanwhile, US officials
write off these deaths as "unfortunate incidents."

Despite this official callous, community groups such as the
Tucson-based Coalition for Human Rights continue to struggle,
very much alone on the Arizona border. Few Chicano or Latino organizations
have so far offered help, other than to express outrage via the
internet, which hopefully will at least allow many of us to know
that the trees are falling, even if we don't do anything about
it.

I visited Tucson, traveling to Bisbee and Douglas on June 2
and 3, 2000. Although I was skeptical that anyone would care about
what happens in that Third World, I drew inspiration from that
so many activists whom I met there three decades ago were still
struggling. Chicanos have maintained multiracial coalitions over
the years, and activists involved in the Hanigan case such as
Guadalupe Castillo, Raquel Rubio Goldsmith, and attorneys Jesus
Romo and Isabel Garcia are still fighting injustice. I also found
that not all the ranchers agreed with Barnett and his ilk.

Still, I was disturbed with some of the change: None of the
Chicano academics who you would expect to be defending the human
rights of the undocumented workers seemed to be involved and there
was not a critical mass of students present at the vigils. I saw
more brown faces in those green uniforms of the Border Patrol
and among the government functionaries. The head of the Border
Patrol is a Tejano and the U.S. Attorney, who claimed that he
brought the Hanigans to justice, is a Chicano. However, interviewing
seemed like deja vu, like interviewing the Los Angeles Police
Department on the Ramparts scandaljust a couple of rogue
copsa couple of bad applesthe system worksyeah!

(Acuña is a professor of Chicana/o Studies, California
State University, Northridge. His books included "Anything
But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles" (Verso,
1996); "Sometimes There is No Other Side: Chicanos and the
Myth of Equality" (Notre Dame, 1998); Occupied America: A
History of Chicanos (Longman, Dec. 1999).)